Category Archives: PS4

At dinner with a friend last night, I was asked what games I’ve been playing lately. It forced me to vocalize something I had been bothered by and not wanting to say out loud to anyone – I hadn’t played any of the new games I bought over a month ago. The plan was to become a tumor on the couch and breeze through Rise of the Tomb Raider, Undertale, Fallout 4, and a bunch more I purchased but didn’t have the time to play until after my semester ended. Alas – none of that happened.

What happened instead was I also purchased the Legendary edition of Destiny to try and get back into the game (I gave up on vanilla around level 20, a few missions short of the end of the main storyline of the game) by playing with friends. And get back into the game I did. It’s been the first MMO I’ve been really hooked on (despite trying World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2). A few days ago I spent all day farming bounties and getting resources for upgrades and a sword. Most of my winter break from school was spent farming levels to get my first character somewhere reasonable for strikes and the first few raids.

So this friend asked me what I’d been playing and I had to say “I’ve been playing nothing but Destiny and Smite.” Smite is a 3rd person MOBA made by Hi-Rez Studios, and is the first MOBA I’ve ever been hooked on. Late last year I succumbed to peer pressure and tried to play a big friendy in-house of DoTA 2 and hated it. My conclusion was DoTA 2 is for smart people, and Smite is for us common folk. Before that encounter, I tried League of Legends a few times in years past and never got into it – going back to it for a few games with friends in my program it’s pace didn’t capture my interest like Smite did, I would assume because of the camera angle.

This is the first time in my life I’ve been stuck in a spiral of live, online games that don’t just end. This is also the first time in my life I’ve had friends I felt comfortable playing games online with. But even so, my all day farm session in Destiny recently was solo, intentionally, and I was so happy for it to be so. I do a lot of solo queueing in Smite because I don’t play a lot of their traditional 5 v 5 map (the rage from sub-par players toward all the rest of us sub-par players is too aggravating for what should just be a game). I finally did join a clan but the few times I’ve been online since joining, anyone that asks to queue together, I just ignore.

This also boils down to deeper considerations like, why do I feel guilty enjoying a game, even if I dump hundreds of hours into it? Why is that bad, when to some, it’s the most cost efficient game I’ve ever purchased? I’m sure part of it goes to being in a game design master’s program. Like all disciplines, you have to be well versed in it to have the most tools at your disposal to create new and/or interesting things within that discipline. I.e. read often and widely to write, watch often and widely to create films, and play often and widely to make games. But here I am, returning to the same killing fields over and over and over again every day.

So in the academic sense, is there a parallel to playing these games incessantly that’s akin to reading deeply? Analyzing texts requires becoming immersed in all the minutiae of the text. Can I claim analyzing the minutiae of the game, which requires playing nothing else? Maybe. If I were really doing that. Smite lends itself to that, as a competitive eSport. It demands to be analyzed to improve or be halfway decent at – if I didn’t learn something deeper about the game 90% of the time I played then I would be getting stomped every game. And I take pride in saying I only get stomped in 50% of the games I play. Ha HA!

Spiraling deeper into this rabbit hole of self-reflection, I also acknowledge that I don’t play games very deeply in general. My introspection is around the level of “why was this enjoyable? What did it do well? What could it improve on?” not “What was the intent behind these systems to inform my player experience?” Throughout my program, I’ve been adamant that I am not a game designer. Mostly because true game design positions are a lot of spreadsheets, testing variable changes in slight directions, and seeing how those effects propagate out through the game. I don’t have the patience for that. Give me a to-do list, and I will become possessed with the notion of getting list completed (again, part of my recent infatuation with Destiny) regardless of what the end product actually is, so long as it actually fits the quality benchmark set forth at the start of the project.

That infatuation also speaks to some my addictive tendencies. Why can’t I enjoy an hour a day of a game and move on to another game? For me, that will be a learned skill at some point. I feel the height of immersion at around the 4th hour. So jumping in for an hour and jumping out just doesn’t seem worth it to me. I definitely play video games for escapism; due to that, immersion is my preferred state of game playing. And that is a state easily achieved when I have an infinite number of checklists, ala Destiny.

In the end, what am I saying? Mostly nothing. Just rambling my thoughts because I realized recently I missed this site. Ultimately, I know I shouldn’t feel bad about playing whatever I want, even if it’s the same thing day in and day out. I should’t feel guilty about not getting through my Steam/console/mobile backlog, regardless of my student status. Having said that, it’s not a bad thing to consider taking a break from games that offer little novelty and diving into critically acclaimed alternatives, even if it requires forcing myself to do so. If for no other reason, it’ll give me more fodder to come back to this page with.

Do you guys struggle with this phenomenon? What do you attribute it to? I’m genuinely curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this topic – it’s one I’ve wrestled with a lot the past few months.

The past two weeks have been kind of amazing. I wrapped up my semester, I got all of my new hardware to build my new AMD PC, the motherboard and/or CPU pooped out on me, so I replaced the motherboard, got the second one yesterday, and it also didn’t work, so it might be both again, or maybe it’s been the CPU the whole time? I dunno but what a whirlwind big city adventure (read: highly annoying and I’ve wanted to pull out my hair everyday and I might have actually shed a tear or three yesterday because I was so. damn. frustrated). But I channeled one of my favorite adages – done is better than perfect.

So instead of waiting for replacement parts, we’re running with Twitch TODAY! On my laptop. Which is super beefy, to it’s credit, but you know – smaller monitor, OBS has problems recording the monitor which is poopy for PC games, etc. etc. BUT WE’RE DOING IT ANYWAY! Done is better than perfect. And to be clear, I worked out OBS so the recording will be great.

Today I’ll be going live with Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor around 3pm Mountain Time (which is also 2pm Pacific Time if that helps anyone). In the future, I plan to stream for about 3 to 4 hours, but today I have a DND campaign to get to at 6pm so I’ll be cutting it around 5:30pm. AND this will all be on twitch.tv/littlesisgaming (different from where I streamed all my Extra Life stuff last year so take note). Can you believe the full sister URL/username was taken? Boo.

My schedule moving forward is Tuesday through Saturday, 3pm (Mountain Time) to whenever I feel like stopping, but most likely for at least 4 hours. And that’s Twitch! The lighting it subpar, the mic is good enough, and the setup on my end is a hodgepodge of cords and balancing monitors on books and speakers, but IT WORKS! And done is better than perfect.

I was updating my HowLongToBeat.com profile with games I got and have just tacked on to my already massive backlog. Mostly this meant adding the PS Plus games I’ve gotten since I bought my PS4 on Black Friday. I realized that I’ve crossed the threshold where I can’t see all of my games on my dashboard any more. As I meandered through my library, I noticed there were a number of PS Plus games that I enjoyed but never finished playing through. It hit me that I never kept playing OlliOlli2, so I started it up and settled in to the tutorials to remembered the first time I tried it.

My friend Paul had told me that it wasn’t on the list of free games that pops up for PS4 because it was one of the cross buys. When I found it and played it, I found him the next day and gushed about how fun it was, and how it was obvious (it a great way) how it was made by people that played Tony Hawk as kids and have since grown up.

One of the most notable features of Tony Hawk is its soundtrack. Alternative to most at the time, or at least the crowd that was playing Tony Hawk, you can talk to most anyone who played the Tony Hawk series in middle school or high school and they will tell you it was ear opening. And I agree – although I didn’t go on to buy the soundtrack or even albums from the featured artists, it made me realize that every genre had something to offer and to shut my fat mouth unless I had actually listened to whatever someone was saying was the best music on earth (instead of being the punk saying that rap/country/metal/whatever sucked).

As I worked my way through the beginning levels of OlliOlli2, those same ear tingles hit me. This, was a damn good soundtrack:

It funky, it’s fresh, it’s underground, it’s perfect to get in a zone to. And I think that last part has particular importance for a game of skill, like OlliOlli2. It has to be something you can grind to (HA) without afterthought. While that’s possible to most music, I think this soundtrack in perfectly suited for it.

The other throwback to Tony Hawk that I found while playing OlliOlli2 was the simplicity of the controls. Tony Hawk never did anything crazy with button combos, you just had to time it all to make it happen. And don’t get me wrong, OlliOlli2 is definitely a more difficult game than any Tony Hawk iteration, but the controls are easy and grok-able. To me, that shows the genius of the developers, Roll7.

All of us that played Tony Hawk as kids think we want to play Tony Hawk again. I personally am looking forward to the new installment that was just announced. But do we really want the same experience? It’ll be enjoyable, no doubt, but I think nostalgia hype will ultimately die as a trend because we all crave something new, something original. If we got a game as straight forward as Tony Hawk, it wouldn’t be as fulfilling.

The hole that gets shot through that observation is that the game is a 2D sidescroller with pixel art . . . and that I think does hail to the nostalgia hype. I don’t hate it, I don’t hate the nostalgia hype, but I there’s definitely a limit. And it’s not out of place, right? If you want a 2D side scrolling skate game, because that will require pixel precision execution of moves and combos, then sure – make it pixel art. Can’t argue with the design choice there.

I still have yet to finish just getting through all the stages. And it is a damn hard game. Don’t get me wrong, you will rage quit. But it’s a wonderful, whole experience – from the music to the combos to the art. If you loved Tony Hawk you deserve to give OlliOlli2: Welcome to Olliwood a chance.